sup/tg/

Jeanstealer bought a domain yesterday - Le Fae Verte, to be exact - and I set her up with delicious DNS and a Wordpress installation. I also set up Simple Picture Gallery Manager for her, a PHP-based photo gallery thingamajig. It's very clean and friendly, and works like a charm if you've only got a few dozen images, since it relies entirely on PHP to do its thing.

So, of course, when I tried to apply it to the sup/tg/ image page - 1093 images, to be exact - it promptly shat itself in fear and cowered under the bed. Since SPGM was wholly inadequate for the massive image needs of sup/tg/, and since the other ready-made picture gallery software out there that uses MySQL seemed to hate me and/or suck, I spent... five or six hours today writing my own picture gallery software in PHP and MySQL (not counting the two or so hours I spent yesterday writing thumbnail generation scripts).

However, it works beautifully and I'm very happy with the results: now, instead of scrolling through an unhelpful Apache directory listing, the sup/tg/ Images page will let you actually see the fucking things before clicking on them.

I'm going to do the same to the art sections and probably clean up the Images and Artwork page to reflect the new galleries... but not tonight. No, I really should go to bed... instead I'm going to eat a sandwich, and play some Dead Space or something (still haven't beaten it!).

Some of my busy schedule included adding a new feature to the archive which likely few people will use or care about: the ability to sort archived threads by average score. This means a thread with a score of +10 out of 10 votes will appear higher on the list than a thread with +20 out of 40 votes. This required more work than it should have, but it was my own fault for coding it stupid in the first place, and it's another way to present data in a meaningful fashion so I'm happy.

Last but not least... uh. I forgot. We're going to try to watch Phantoms and Mind Warp this weekend, which should be fun. As always, you can submit articles to myself or Ruler or Purple or Jean or ... I don't think I gave Mx an email address yet but him too. One last note about the articles section is that I've added some legal licenses regarding copyright, so authors can feel safe that I'm not going to take their sweat, tears, blood and feces and use them for nefarious purposes. It's especially relevant (and the permissions especially strict) for articles regarding Game Design, so people can feel free to talk about their awesome projects without fear.

Oh, one last thing! I did end up moving Purple and Jean's articles on Exalted, Lacuna and Planescape into the actual Articles section, so if you're looking for them on the frontpage, they've been transferred over.

Huzzah, it's finally finished! The Articles section of sup/tg/ is now done. Once again, it took a few-hour up-until-5:40 day to do it, but it's done! The navigation is a bit shit at the moment, but whatever. People can start submitting articles for each of the categories, either by stopping in the IRC or shooting me an email. Ruler and Jean and Purple, too, and MxSavior soon!

I don't know how any of this is going to work yet, at least in terms of how new articles are announced; I might put a thin top banner at the top of the frontpage with the last couple posted articles visible, as well as any planned events or other notable things. I also don't have a particular posting schedule in mind, either; multiple simultaneous submissions will likely get posted one by one (preferably one a day), and I'll figure out how and when they'll get posted on a weekly basis.

Last and certainly not least, remember, this is for the benefit of /tg/ as a whole; you don't need to be a sup/tg/ regular to have an article posted. Hell, you could be visiting for the very first time today, and if you send something awesome our way it'll get posted. As long as the article's decent, we'll post anything related to any /tg/ topic, from your favorite DF stories to game design ideas or new homebrew systems to general (eloquent!) rants about why something sucks or rocks. So go ahead and submit your articles!